


Luminesce

by astarsdarkheart



Series: in morsum ardeo [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: (even if the fact is a side note thus far), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Jedi comprehension failures, Padme Survives, obi-wan is confused, the Force continues to not actually work like this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-20
Updated: 2017-09-20
Packaged: 2018-12-31 23:55:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12143904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astarsdarkheart/pseuds/astarsdarkheart
Summary: Medical facilities are sites of tremendous feats of tenacity and science. They are not usually sites for what appears to be some form of resurrection. Nor do they typically give rise to black holes in the Force.





	Luminesce

**Author's Note:**

> Yup, _Incandescence_ got expanded on. I liked the AU I'd posited too much to just leave it where it was, although I may have written myself into a corner on a couple of points precisely because _Incandescence_ was originally meant to be a one-shot thing. But oh well, writing myself out of said corners might well provide a great deal of plot.  
>  I'm still a little unsure about how Anakin's POV in _Incandescence_ feeds into Obi-Wan's here, but it's going to have to be the way it is. It's not all about Anakin and his ideas, even if writing it that way would suit me fine.

Easy to tell himself that it made no difference that he’d not finished the job on the banks of the river of molten rock. Easy to tell himself that even had Anakin regretted his actions and pledged his allegiance to the Jedi ideals again, there was no way for him to atone for all the atrocities his cold metal hand had shaped. Easy to tell himself that there was no way to know that Padmé would have emerged unscathed from the encounter had he not been there to draw Anakin’s rage in a different direction.

He turned away from the window into the medbay, lifting a hand to support his head as he sighed. _There is no emotion, there is peace._ He had to calm himself. Why was it so easy to say those things, to echo truths he’d heard from every wall in the Temple for years on end, and so difficult to believe any of it?

_Think, you clod. No human – not even one of Tatooine – can survive the conditions on Mustafar for long. All the younglings dead, so many Jedi dead by his treachery if not by his hand – what could he ever do to wash the blood off his hands after that? And what could Padmé have done if he’d flown into that rage with only her nearby to take it out on? I doubt she could have so much as tried to kill him..._

As if he were any different. He’d had Anakin at his mercy, a defenceless breathing corpse slowly charring to pieces, and he’d –

No. Not defenceless. He shook his head, fingers tightening on his temples as he sighed. Anakin – or whatever odious title his new master had given him – had learnt enough of the Dark Side already to know how to strangle someone with it. Did it matter that he’d most likely not been thinking clearly any longer once Obi-Wan had cut him down? That the pain of dismemberment and the scorching rock below him might well have overridden any attempt at thought that Anakin had been given to?

Force preserve him, Anakin was _lost_. He forced himself to turn back to the medbay window. The droids moved in jittery bursts around Padmé. Intermittent beeps and buzzing noises rang through the wall. The droids had no facial expressions or living Force presences for him to read, but Padmé’s presence was growing no stronger, no more assured.

 _Focus. There is no ignorance, there is knowledge._ Padmé had still been stable when he’d brought her to Polis Massa, if weak. Why was there no improvement? His gaze flickered towards the elevator at the end of the corridor. If the droids found something they weren’t equipped to deal with, that was the route any additional droids would arrive by. Right now, the lights weren’t flashing, the elevator wasn’t moving; no backup had been summoned. The droids had no cause to believe their abilities were insufficient. And yet... no improvement.

The door to the medbay slid open. One of the droids emerged, hesitating until Obi-Wan lifted his gaze. “Medically, she is completely healthy.”

He nodded. As expected, even if something clearly wasn’t right. The droid carried on, slowing its words. “For reasons we cannot explain, we are losing her.”

Obi-Wan blinked. His brow tightened as he looked back at Padmé. One might have thought her already dead if not for the flashing pulse indicator above her, and there were no Jedi Healers to be found here. _There is no passion, there is serenity._ One could call the unconscious woman serene, perhaps. But for her to die thanks to Anakin’s fall...

A loud buzz from along the corridor made him jump. The droid drifted back inside the door. “We have not requested additional support.”

Obi-Wan frowned as his gaze shifted from the droid to the source of the noise, the elevator at the end of the corridor. The lights were flashing now. The elevator was rising through the floors of the medical facility. That couldn’t be a fluke. _There is no chaos, there is harmony._ He shut his eyes, breaths slowing as he sank his mind into a state as close to empty meditation as he could manage on such short notice, seeking some sensory purchase beyond the walls.

Red lightning slammed into him, shocking his eyes open. The whole world lit up blue-white with a roaring fire like the depths of a star. One wrist blazed under his weight as he crumpled, the other hand tight around his temples, pressing in on the fire in his skull.

For a moment, every sense was filled with a presence so raw and blinding that his composure cracked and from another star system he heard himself gasp.

“Master Jedi? Are you well?”

He shook his head. His ribs struck his lungs like a Falling Avalanche blow just to push the air out. Sith kriffing _hells_ , what had he sensed?

He blinked and shook himself. Both hands on the floor to push himself upright. He couldn’t reach out again. Even trying to restore his baseline sensitivity, that casual awareness of his surroundings and their patterns in the Force that all Jedi learnt to maintain, brought the blaze back into his bones like it lived there.

He put one hand to the wall and forced himself to blink. The lights by the elevator had ceased to flash. He had to squint to focus on the door as it slid aside.

The figure that stepped out... His eyes widened, and with the influx of light the figure only blurred. But whoever – _whatever_ – it was, it was familiar.

It shouldn’t have been. If he’d seen something like this before... surely he’d have remembered.

The figure drew closer, long, powerful strides that brought it close enough to stand over Obi-Wan far too quickly. A dark robe worryingly reminiscent of the Jedi cut hung draped over broad shoulders. Strimlets of burn-edged fabric shifted below the robe. Easier to look at the broken remnants of whatever clothing this searing creature had once worn than its face.

The figure’s presence made the air remarkably cold. Alarming, with the hand not covered by a dark leather glove appearing to be made of some trickster fire.

He bit together and forced himself to look up. There was a human face there somewhere, below the skin seared to charcoal and flickering facets of that inconsistent trickster fire. Red and blue and green in shifting glimmers. His eyes couldn’t find purchase on any of it.

“Obi-Wan.”

He jumped at the sudden words. Soft, drawn from a deeply damaged voice box. So this... being was familiar, somehow. Somehow. “Yes.”

“Why did you come here?” Something twitched around what had to be the creature’s eyes. “To a medical facility?”

 _Is this thing tracking me? Another of the Sith Lord’s..._ Obi-Wan’s jaw clenched, but he couldn’t prevent his gaze flicking sideways towards the medbay window.

The creature’s head turned. The flickering fire behind the ice of its skin froze in violet.

Something like a tidal wave crashed against the fragile walls Obi-Wan had raised for the first time since he’d become a Padawan, knocking them aside to bring the crying out of the wounded Force coursing through his veins. He fell together against the window as the figure exploded, past him before he could blink and next to the medical droid that hovered anxiously in the door with only a hissing whisper left behind: “I won’t lose her.”

Not just tracking him, then. Familiar with Padmé Amidala too. But how –

The figure froze in the doorway and turned to face Obi-Wan again, stalling his thoughts as his breath caught. A spark-filled hand lifted, fingers outstretched. Something tugged on Obi-Wan’s belt. His hand went to contain the tremor, but the lightsabre he’d picked up off Mustafar’s hot earth snapped off its clip and spun across the intervening paces to settle in the creature’s hand. It vanished underneath the creature’s cloak, and without a word the burning figure turned and stepped through the door.

His chest folded in as the air vanished from his lungs. How had he not... Force give him strength, he’d raised the boy since he was nine... and _there is no death, there is the Force._

He lifted his head to look into the medbay. The still violet flames began to flicker again as the figure bowed over Padmé, one hand reaching out to brush her cheek.

“Anakin...” He shook his head, putting one hand flat against the window, half a surrender. “What have you become?”

 

 _The Jedi limit, the Sith embrace. For millennia the Jedi_ _have forbidden_ _certain techniques, quashed the undogmatic thought that its younger, brighter members_ _a_ _re so often inclined to. They harbour a particular distaste for ‘relativists’, those who claim that darkness only manifests itself in the mind of a Force wielder, not in a true ‘Dark Side’ of the Force._ _As such, there can be no forbidden use of the Force, no ‘Dark Side ability’, because the Force has no such divisions._

 _A well indoctrinated Jedi Knight will recite by rote that those who believe that any action can be taken so long as their intent is pure will soon come to believe their intent is always right. They continue to believe that this_ _can_ _be counted as a counter-argument – as if to suggest that the flaw lies in always believing one is right does not indicate a darkness in the mind, independent of any darkness that may exist in the Force._

_And as if their own insistence that their way is the only way to truly understand the Force does not provide a spectacular example of the very failing they claim will be the end of any relativist who rises in their ranks._

_In the end, what does the Force care? It spans worlds, galaxies. It ties the burning_ _kyber_ _heart of a star to the little shifting, shaking nodules of life_ _that crawl and grow on these eternally collapsing spheres we call homes. It is in every living creature and every mote of astral dust in between them._ _How much can the Force care – if it has enough of a mind to care at all – about things like the darkness in an individual mind, or whether its power is used in a way that some self-appointed guardians of that power have deemed righteous, when it already contains so much, more than any mind could ever truly comprehend?_

_The Force lives within us all, yes. But does a single one of us matter on our own?_

 

Obi-Wan had taught himself a variety of meditation exercises over the years, many of which were variations on moving meditation easily possible to conduct even in tense situations that required immediate readiness. But try as he might to settle his mind, he couldn’t tear his attention away from the figure that stood over Padmé – whatever remained of his old apprentice.

There had to be more under that loosely gathered robe than what had remained of Anakin’s body, though. Force preserve him, he’d taken off three limbs – _mou kei_ had always been considered taboo in the Temple’s training rooms, but how many choices had been left to him? Anakin should not have been able to stand at his old height. And he still carried the burn wounds that Mustafar’s acid landscape had given him.

How had he not died from it?

His glowing form was stationary over Padmé now. The colours of the trickster fire ran hotter, scarlet and yellow hiding the damage that Obi-Wan had done.

He sighed and let his hand fall from the window. The thought of removing what little protection his mind had against the overwhelming power contained within Anakin – whatever dark abyss that power had come from – made him shiver. But as... alarmingly intense as that power was, it had spoken to Obi-Wan’s own ability in the Force. How was he to understand any facet of it, save by letting his own ability in the Force guide him? He could only hope that the sheer luminescence of... whatever Anakin had become wouldn’t tear his mind to pieces.

He shut his eyes. He had to maintain control. If anything else distracted him from this, it could leave him far too exposed.

The presence beyond the wall swallowed up any trace he might have felt of Padmé, of the still forming lives she carried. He winced as searching thought brushed the edges of the consuming presence at the centre of everything – such wild, storming threads of life and death woven together in something entirely unlike any life form he’d ever encountered. Unlike what Anakin had been, before the Dark Side had taken root in him and changed his presence from the lightning-lit storm cloud to a tumultuous, tearing corruption of the boy Obi-Wan had raised.

Did he live at all? He shouldn’t have been able to. Qui-Gon had found some way to retain a presence in the Force – Obi-Wan had heard his voice many times in deep meditation – but that wasn’t what Anakin had done. If this had anything to do with –

His eyes opened as he drew in a shuddering, gasping breath. Force preserve him, he _couldn’t_ keep thinking of Anakin as he’d thought he knew the man. He’d knelt to a Sith Lord, taken up a title that had begun with barbaric sorcerers practising necrotic magic millennia ago, and then... everything that had been said and done on Mustafar...

And whatever had brought Anakin here now, it wasn’t a sudden change of heart and a return to Jedi ideals. Not with that chaotic maelstrom of power drawing everything else that Obi-Wan should have been able to sense into its black hole.

The Sith code, from what Obi-Wan remembered, was one centred on gaining power. If the Chancellor – Emperor, though thinking of Palpatine that way brought bile to his throat – hadn’t shown himself the ideal of that code with his coup... and now here stood Anakin Skywalker, the Hero with No Fear, the Republic’s saviour, his old Padawan and former brother in arms, his mockery of a body bathed in a power the mere awareness of which made Obi-Wan stagger.

Below the white sheet, Padmé’s body shuddered. Anakin’s glowing hand moved away from her. But he still hovered, looming like a predator.

Obi-Wan shook his head and pushed the droid out of the way to stride into the room. Anakin lifted his head as Obi-Wan froze just inside the door.

He took a deep breath and folded his arms, hands hidden in the sleeves of his robe. “Anakin.”

“Yes.”

The words caught in his throat. He let his gaze fall to the floor and sighed. “Why did _you_ come here?”

No answer. In the silence of a thousand sounds just out of his hearing, Obi-Wan lifted his head.

He couldn’t make out the colour of Anakin’s eyes behind the jumping fire contained in the cold glass that looked to be all that was holding Anakin’s wild being together.

“You were here.” An incredulous breath. Anakin shook his head. “Where else would I go?”

“You shouldn’t have survived this long after I left you...”

The air clenched a fist around Obi-Wan, making his breath wheeze out. The trickster fire imitating flesh darkened to blood-red as Anakin turned his head, away from Padmé on the sickbed, away from Obi-Wan. Shaking himself, he managed to draw in enough air to gasp out, “Not even with Sith abilities...”

“Sith abilities did not save Sidious.”

Obi-Wan reeled back from the venom in the hissed words. The air softened, though Anakin didn’t look back at him. At least, he didn’t lift his head. Obi-Wan still couldn’t focus on any feature long enough to discern a facial expression.

In a time now lost to him entirely, he wouldn’t have needed to read an expression to sense something of Anakin’s thoughts. But now his sheer _presence_ overwhelmed everything.

“Sidious... came to Mustafar?”

Anakin nodded. “The Emperor is dead.”

Obi-Wan shuddered. That... simmering anger below the iced-over words... what the Council had feared all along. That Anakin would never learn the control that he needed, to be a Jedi. Never learn to be at peace.

So the Sith apprentice had killed his Master. Obi-Wan took a deep breath that shuddered through his throat. _How can you stand here and talk to a Lord of the Sith – one who has become a black hole in the Force – so calmly?_ To even let Anakin stand there – never mind how he was standing at all – was flirting with catastrophe.

But how much more catastrophic could matters become? The Republic had already fallen. Sidious’ death had come days too late. Now they lived under an Empire without any authority, any peace keepers. Without any Jedi. Even if Anakin had lived, found a way to cheat life like this... where was Obi-Wan supposed to go?

_Where are any of us meant to go? War between clones and droids was bad enough. Now... it may be every bared throat against a thousand knives._

“You don’t seem pleased.”

Obi-Wan started, lifting his gaze to Anakin and his tilted head. “The Republic... it’s already gone.” _And you were the hand that choked the last life out of it..._ “What will killing the Emperor do now but plunge the galaxy into yet more chaos?”

“It has put an end to his schemes.”

He wanted to argue, to explain to his old Padawan that it couldn’t be that simple, but the words failed to form. He shook his head, every other process stalled in his mind.

A rolling gasp broke the silence. Obi-Wan’s gaze snapped across to Padmé, shuddering under the sheet. Anakin’s gaze followed his, and once again the trickster fire froze.

One of the medical droids was over the distressed – but alive – woman in an instant. After a few moments of whirring and buzzing, the droid lifted its head – inasmuch as the optics casing counted as a head. “She is stabilising, but it appears that she has gone into the early stages of labour.”

Burning ice burst out of Anakin with a force that slammed Obi-Wan back against the wall. Blinking hard against the flashes in his vision, he saw Anakin return to stand over Padmé, his gloved metal hand folding into Padmé’s grip.

For a creature that seemed to swallow every shard of the Force around him, Anakin’s presence remained so... luminous. It burnt through Obi-Wan’s eyelids as he crumpled together, unable to take in anything more than the blaze in the Force.

**Author's Note:**

> If Obi-Wan gets a POV, so does Padmé, but we'll see when. I have a couple ideas for where I could go from here, but I'm not decided on much beyond the immediate next scene to be written.


End file.
